『Sustainability In Your Ear』のカバーアート

Sustainability In Your Ear

Sustainability In Your Ear

著者： Mitch Ratcliffe
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今ならプレミアムプランが3カ月 月額99円

2026年5月12日まで。4か月目以降は月額1,500円で自動更新します。

概要

 Mitch Ratcliffe interviews activists, authors, entrepreneurs and changemakers working to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, post-carbon society. You have more power to improve the world than you know! Listen in to learn and be inspired to give your best to restoring the climate and regenerating nature.Copyright 2025 Internet Media Strategies Inc. マネジメント・リーダーシップ リーダーシップ 地球科学 生物科学 科学 経済学
エピソード
  • Author Michael Maniates on Why Green Shopping Isn't Enough

    Author Michael Maniates on Why Green Shopping Isn't Enough
    2026/04/13
    In 2024, the global market for eco-labeled products crossed $500 billion. Electric vehicles, bamboo toothbrushes, compostable packaging — the shelves are full of ways to shop your way to a better planet. And yet global carbon emissions hit another record high that same year, and atmospheric CO₂ now stands above 429 parts per million. Decades of research have produced a finding that the sustainability industry doesn't want to talk about: buying green products doesn't drive the systemic change we need. It might not even be moving the needle. That's the core argument of Michael Maniates, an environmental social scientist and author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism. Michael has spent more than 30 years studying why well-intentioned environmental choices at the checkout line fail to add up to real-world emissions reductions, and what kinds of action actually do. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, he makes the case that the most powerful thing an eco-conscious person can do isn't swap their products. It's to become an active citizen.

    The resulting cycle has a name in Michael's framework: the trinity of despair. Earnest effort. Negligible impact. Creeping anxiety that we can't turn the corner. People try hard, see little result, feel guilty when they can't maintain perfection, and eventually burn out — or conclude that meaningful change requires getting every single person on board first. He is a sharp critic of what sociologist Elizabeth Shove has called the ABC model of social change: shift Attitudes, change Behavior, and better Choices will follow. It's the backbone of most sustainability communications — and, he argues, it's empirically fragile. Pro-environmental attitudes don't reliably produce pro-environmental behavior. Yet the model persists in education, marketing, and environmental organizing alike. Why does it keep coming back? Maniates identifies two reasons. First, it's deeply embedded in the educational system. Second, it sanitizes a genuinely gnarly problem of power and politics into a communication challenge: if we just get more information out there, people will make better choices. That framing shifts blame onto consumers, hides the structural drivers of high-carbon living, and makes life easier for politicians who don't want to touch the structural stuff.

    Find Michael Maniates' work, including his email to ask your direct questions, at michaelmaniates.com. His book, Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life Within Sustainable Limits is available as a free download. The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism was published in November 2025 by Polity Press.
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    1 時間 3 分
  • Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns

    Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns
    2026/04/06
    $850 billion. That's what retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026, generating 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste — and a surprising share of it involves products that worked perfectly. They just didn't look the way people expected. About 22% of consumers return items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles, that number climbs higher. The culprit has a name: metamerism — the way colors shift under different light sources, so the navy sectional and the matching throw pillow that looked identical on your screen clash under your living room LEDs. Don Carli, founder of Nima Hunter and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, joins Sustainability In Your Ear to explain why this keeps happening and what it would take to stop it.

    The fix isn't a moonshot. The relevant standards — glTF for digital rendering and ICC Max for physical material appearance — already exist and were designed to be connected. Digital textile printing already makes it possible to produce fabrics with pigment recipes that match under any lighting condition, not just one. What's missing is coordination: brands putting spectral consistency requirements into their supplier purchase orders, the same way the GMI certification transformed packaging quality once Target and Home Depot required it. The Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group has already standardized how products look across digital screens — the next step is bridging that standard to the physical object.

    When we get this right, a sofa stays in the home it was ordered for instead of traveling a thousand miles back to a distribution center and ending up in a landfill. That's what circularity looks like when it's applied to the seam between the digital world and the physical one.

    Follow Don's work at WhatTheyThink.com and on X at @DCarli.
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    49 分
  • Sustainability In Your Ear: Schneider Electric's Steve Wilhite Maps the Renewable Energy Transition

    Sustainability In Your Ear: Schneider Electric's Steve Wilhite Maps the Renewable Energy Transition
    2026/03/30
    The global energy system is changing in two big ways: it is moving from centralized fossil-fuel generation to distributed renewables, and it is becoming more digital in how energy is measured, traded, and optimized. Steve Wilhite, Executive Vice President of Advisory Services at Schneider Electric, works at the intersection of these complementary yet challenging transitions. Schneider supports more than 40% of the Fortune 500 with energy procurement and sustainability strategies, managing over $50 billion in annual energy spending. His experience shows something that pledges and press releases often miss: the biggest challenge for corporate sustainability is not money, technology, or political will. The real issue is the gap between ambition and the ability to deliver. Companies are making Science-Based Targets commitments faster than they are building the infrastructure to meet them. Scope one and two emissions are being managed better, but scope three emissions, which come from a company's supply chain, still present a systems problem that no single company can solve alone. Schneider's zero-carbon supplier program suggests what it takes to close this gap. When the company started its own effort to cut emissions from its top 1,000 suppliers by 50% in five years, all 1,000 signed up within two weeks. However, about 84% of them did not fully understand what they had agreed to. Achieving success meant creating measurement tools, education programs, and action plans to help the whole ecosystem, not just individual companies.

    This critical conversation explores how renewable energy is bought, including the difference between physical and virtual power purchase agreements. Steve also explains why the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) market became more complex as it grew, and why 10% fewer renewable deals closed in 2025 compared to 2024, as tech companies used up available clean energy.He also addresses a key question in clean energy: is AI helping the environment overall, or do its energy needs still outweigh its efficiency benefits? Schneider processes over a million energy invoices each month, and about 50,000 of them had issues that took 10 to 15 business days to resolve. Now, a team of AI systems can handle these in seconds. Accurate energy consumption and billing data directly affect emissions reporting, energy efficiency, and money-saving market decisions. He describes Schnieder's approach as "frugal AI": using the right-sized models for each task, running them on clean energy, and choosing simple solutions over complex ones. Looking ahead, electrification is building a global digital energy network in which every meter and adjustment contributes to a new system independent of central plants. As intelligence spreads, power can shift to consumers, communities, and businesses. Schneider is enabling this shift by building a mesh grid in which each point both produces and consumes energy, coordinated by AI. These changes fundamentally reshape the global energy landscape. The central question: will we intentionally build this new, distributed system, or will we repeat centralized patterns digitally?

    To learn more about Schneider Electric's sustainability efforts, visit se.com.
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    54 分
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